ABSTRACT
At the close of an August 1874, letter to Theodore Watts, Swinburne took a parting shot at the much-lauded (and, for its author and publisher, quite lucrative) work by the English-speaking world's most prominent poet, Idylls of the King. Swinburne's excoriation reveals inadvertently an unexpected perspicacity regarding a poem and poet with whom he did not sympathize. The Pre-Raphaelite's fleshly sensibilities could never abide the high-toned Christianity of the Laureate's Idylls, but in his sneering condemnation of Tennyson's idealism Swinburne buries provocative insight within rebuke. In ridiculing the way Tennyson's poem presents its "ideal manhood closed in real man" ("To the Queen" 38) as a cuckold, Swinburne links Arthur with Joseph of Nazareth and his (in Swinburne's reckoning) adopted son, and ironically, in so doing he points toward the particular kind of surrender-a submission of the self to a larger set of desires-that becomes the imprisonment necessary to effect the sort of transcendent power all three of those characters (Arthur, Joseph, and Jesus) achieve. 1 Referring to a chapter title, "Joseph and his Burden: Buck's Head" (Chapter 42 of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd), that he had seen advertised in Cornhill Magazine/ Swinburne suggests that Dante Gabriel Rossetti might share his "shock" in seeing in this title "a most unseemly reference to the domestic misfortune which 1874 years since embittered the household relations of a respectable carpenter of the Hebrew persuasion." With characteristic wit and verve, Swinburne concludes that:
If the mystery of our redemption is thus to be associated by ribald writers with the badge of cuckoldom, what wonder that our Laureate should find in the ideal cuckold his type of the ideal man? (Lang 2.335)
Swinburne's comment provides an anti-gloss on certain inescapable features of the Idylls: its insistent concern with the ideal and its almost fetishistic attention to taboo sexuality, particularly adultery. Idealism and adultery understandably strike readers of this Victorian epic as bedfellows almost too strange to contemplate, yet obviously Tennyson's contemporaries found in their
Laureate's Arthuriad a ringing truth and engaging reading. Gladstone, perhaps, sounded the note of public approbation most loudly. The story of Arthur (as given by Tennyson in the Idylls of 1859), he said,
The public purchased Idylls of the King with marked fervor. Some forty thousand copies of the 1859 first edition were printed, over ten thousand of which sold in the first week (C. Tennyson 319). Apparently, the Victorian reading public had little trouble affirming the prowess of a poem that associates "the mystery of our redemption" with cuckoldom. Why this was so invites explanation.
